3/26/08

"Santa Dance" - Shawn McInerney

"I drew it all digitally with a Cintiq. I used TVP Animation to do the pencil tests, and then imported the drawings to Toon Boom for the cleanup, ink, and paint."

(the advantage to clean-up and ink & paint in Toon Boom is because Toon Boom is a vector application which allows exporting to smaller .SWF files , which is important for making animation which is primarily web-based such as e-cards. I have also found that it is effective to rough and clean-up in TVPaint at high resolution , then export the drawings to Adobe Illustrator for conversion from bitmap to vector lines , then import the vectorized line drawings into ToonBoom or Flash for coloring. If the clean-up drawings from TVPaint are tight enough and drawn at a high enough resolution they can also be imported directly to ToonBoom using Toon Boom's "Import & Vectorize" function which will auto trace the bitmap drawings to vector format. Again, this is helpful if very small file size and exporting to .SWF file format is important for fast playback on the web.)

EDIT: if the embedded link for this clip is down, click on the following link to see the animation on Shawn McInerney's site: